The Very Good Reason Why You Can't Get That Google Art-Selfie Feature in Illinois or Texas

Some residents of Illinois and Texas are angry that they can’t easily determine which work of art looks 42 percent like them while allowing Google to capture their biometric souls.

The Google Art & Culture app has been out for about a year and a half, but it recently hit the top of the Android and iPhone download charts because of the popularity of a new feature that uses machine learning to match selfies with portraits from more than 1,200 museums. The app has raised privacy concerns about what Google is doing with the data. Though, to be fair, there’s no proof that Google is keeping biometric data or stealing souls. A Google spokesperson told The Washington Post that the feature does not keep photos after they are used to determine a fine-art doppelgänger and that it is not a scheme to create a database or train machine-learning programs.

But regardless of what Google is doing with the face photos, some people are prevented from participating in the digital Dorian Grey exercise. The app feature isn’t available in every US state, and that’s probably because of policies that are meant to protect their residents from handing over personal data for the sake of amusement and convenience . As Chicago Tribune and Houston Chronicle have pointed out, both Illinois and Texas have laws that block the collection of biometrics—like finger, retina, and face scans—for unclear purposes.

Earlier this year, Washington became the third state to enact biometrics laws, but Gizmodo found that users in the state can access the art-selfie feature.

Google did not immediately reply to a Gizmodo request for comment on whether the biometric laws have kept the company from making the art-selfie feature available in Texas and Illinois. A Google spokesperson declined to comment to Chicago Tribune on why the feature is not available in Illinois

As the Chicago Tribune notes, Nest, the smart-home tech company owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, makes a doorbell that uses facial recognition. But that feature is not available in units sold in Illinois thanks to the biometrics law. Christopher Dore—a partner at Edelson, a Chicago law firm that is representing people suing Facebook for collecting their biometic data—told the outlet that Google is “being overly cautious” in its decision to keep the art-selfie feature out of Illinois.

Correction: The previous headline of this post incorrectly stated that users in Illinois and Texas could not “get that Google art-selfie app.” While the Google Art & Culture app is available for download in those states, the art-selfie feature is not accessible to Illinois and Texas. We regret the error.

I’m still waiting for the very good reason that we have to find this out from Gizmodo instead of Google including a little pop-up message in the app. Even without an explanation why, it would have saved a lot of frustration if it just told you that the feature was not available in your area.

That would have been nice, but you can’t blame them too much if Google didn’t publicly disclose it. It’s natural that the backlash didn’t reach newsworthy levels until a few days after the initial excitement. Google’s decision to hide something that they knew people would be looking for instead of being open about it is just disappointing.

A Google spokesperson told The Washington Post that the feature does not keep photos after they are used to determine a fine-art doppelgänger and that it is not a scheme to create a database or train machine-learning programs. This sounds like tricksy wording to me. The spokesman does not deny that the biometric data is retained by the company and might be used in the future. Really, gathering such data is probably the whole purpose of the program.

Did you look at the actual WaPo article, or are you just going off of the summary written here? The comments in the WaPo article are pretty clear: “Google is not using these selfies for anything other than art matches,” said Patrick Lenihan, a company spokesman. The Arts & Culture app also says in one of its prompts that Google “will only store your photo for the time it takes to search for matches.”﻿ The app says it’s only being used for the take it takes to conduct a search, and the spokesman says they are not using the selfies for anything other than the art matches. But even then, I’m not really sure how “not using these selfies for anything other” is tricky wording. It’s a statement from a spokesman, not a lawyer writing a terms of service where you would expect more precise wording like “is not, nor will it ever.”

Texas is the worst state in the country- especially Galveston sucks. I will never spend another red cent in that state- I will not travel through it and I will not do business based with any company in Texas.

All I know about this app is that some douche bag in my office was running around and taking everybody’s photos with it without telling them what he was doing until afterward. Now, I just hate it by proxy, because dude is such an all around douche. This app has his stink on it now.